I've been here for a while, looked at a lot of profiles, but I have yet to find anyone who is a member of a public group. Even our esteemed creator Jeremy isn't a member of one. Are there even any groups to be a member of? Is there a list of groups somewhere? Can I make a new group?

I can't find the answer to any of these questions in the FAQ

We do not use any public group functionality.

--jeremy

Adding to that, I don't see how using groups would help finding answers, not straight away, at least.

I don't know how it would either, I was intrigued that its in our profiles yet I've never seen any. At least I don't feel left out anymore!

I see a use for public groups. Distributions. The current method of listing distributions in our profile actually leads to discrepancies. Not everybody lists their distribution in the same way.

Eg. Some people list it as "Slack" and others as "Slackware 11" and yet others as "Slackware-11" and some simply as "Slackware". There are endless variations of this and so that searching for users with the same distro is made more complicated.

Currently if I click the distribution link in my user profile, I get only a few matches, whereas I'm sure there are other Debian users who list it differently from mine (e.g. Debian-testing, Debian-etch or similar) and they do not appear in the list.

On the other hand, having a public group for each major/popular distro and allowing users to add themselves to one or more distribution user group(s) of their choice would be a good idea.

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly does a public group do? I guess this is something I ought to know, but to be honest, I don't have a clue. If public groups were enabled on LQ, what additional functionality would be available? Are they like tags, but for the members?

Edit: rephrased comments

Generally this is how groups are used.

Groups can be used for a variety of purposes on vBulletin, including permissions-handling on a per-group basis. It can be used to build sub-communities within large communities as well by restricting access to certain parts of the site and not to others. Groups can also be used to club moderators or other site staff by the admin so that you can collectively set their permissions. Usergroups can either be public or private. Public = anybody can join, private = only admin can add users to that group.

So a variety of reasons exist for usergroups. Here's a more detailed explanation of usergroups as implemented by vBulletin:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/usergroups

But in my proposal, I just want usergroups to exist simply for the sake of users being able to add themselves to identify with their distro and nothing to do with advanced features like permissions and access control.

Thanks for the link.